Posted
by
samzenpuson Sunday May 27, 2012 @04:55PM
from the loaded-for-bear dept.

dgharmon writes in with a story about the final outcome of thousands of Nortel patents that were bought last July. "You may recall last summer that Apple, Microsoft, EMC, RIM, Ericsson and Sony all teamed up to buy Nortel's patents for $4.5 billion. They beat out a team of Google and Intel who bid a bit less. While there was some antitrust scrutiny over the deal, it was dropped and the purchase went through. Apparently, the new owners picked off a bunch of patents to transfer to themselves... and then all (minus EMC, who, one hopes, was horrified by the plans) decided to support a massive new patent troll armed with the remaining 4,000 patents. The company is called Rockstar Consortium, and it's run by the folks who used to run Nortel's patent licensing program anyway — but now employs people whose job it is to just find other companies to threaten." On a semi-related note, there is a new petition to the White House to make a law that patent lawsuits that find for the defendant automatically fine the plaintiff three times the damages they were seeking."

But being a lawyer makes more money and you get to decide who you screw.

A lot of highly paid escorts would disagree with you.

There are lower tier escorts that might not have as much choice, but there are a lot of entry level lawyers with even less choice - and probably worse pay when you factor in takeaway after the student loan payment.

I disagree. Prostitutes at least provide a service, at times at considerable personal risk, with considerable effort and skill. At least the legal ones do not blatantly rip off customers or generate artificial demand. I'd rather have a prostitute in my family than a patent lawyer or similar parasites of society - and I really mean it.

Believe it or not there are honorable lawyers left. They're rare, but they do exist. Unfortunately, they seem to be poor while the less honorable ones seem to profiting. I do know a couple and they've done a lot of good keeping innocent people out of jail and if they think the client is honestly guilty they generally won't take their case. Which is why they're normally broke, because the innocent people aren't the ones with the money. We even have one here on/. he goes by the handle NYCountyLawyer. I'd con

..they seem to be poor while the less honorable ones seem to profiting....

The same can be said of politicians and pretty much any other profession. Its sad when the less honorable are rewarded for being that way. Its sad when we the sheeple, continue to support their BS by doing business with them, buying their products (gas, oil, energy, current financial system, etc...) At what point does this gravitate toward Fascism from Capitalism...is debatable, with the debate being shaped by the media and talking points utterly controlled by those same not honorable 1%. Personally I think we are already there...Fascism.

In my mind Capitalism requires:

~ livable wages, not just minimum wage...if In-N-Out Burger can pay $10.00 per hour [slashdot.org] to a high schooler getting his first job, what is the excuse for McDonalds, Wendys, Burger King, etc... They could but they do not want too. After all you want people to be able to afford to purchase your products, right. Ford understood this back in 1914, and he was far from a humanitarian:

~ Healthy workers with 100% health care, its more than just a safety net, its required, if your workers are not healthy enough to work, they are not good to anyone, including themselves. And annual health costs of $18,365 - $24,965 [slashdot.org], ($8.83 – 12.00 per hour) is NOT affordable for anyone earning minimum wage. Don't think you are okay if you are working for someone else as you are paying close to 41% of your health care costs (medical care and perscriptions) [slashdot.org] which comes to $8,584 annually [slashdot.org] or $4.13 per hour. Still way too high. Regardless of who is in control, costs are only going to go up as the groups that could prevent that have been weakened by both political parties. Two-party system, what a joke...you have no choice.

~ Flexible work hours, not inflexible work hours where you do not just work 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, but are considered less than perfect if you want to have time with your family instead of putting in 9, 10, or 11 hour days...unpaid hours at that. Get creative, instead of just 20% flex time, give your employees the options of working 3 X 12 hour days, 36 hours per week, get paid for 40 hours and have 4 days off. Just the savings in Gas to/from work commute alone would help your worker and their family. Might even bleed over into helping the economy both directly and indirectly.

In-N-Out is not comparable to McDonalds et al. Most McDonalds are franchises; wages are not set by the corporation. In-N-Out sells a premium product. The In-N-Outs I've seen are drivethrough only.

Ford's high wages achieved the goal of acquiring only the best workers. If all manufacturers had started to pay the same as Ford, Ford would not have gotten the best workers, the competitive advantage would disappeared, and Ford's experiment might have failed.

Health costs are not paid for out of nothing. If a person's living expenses exceed the value of what he produces, he is a net burden on society. He then lives either on charity or theft (one form of theft is getting support from the government.)

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Worst of all is this: "In my mind Capitalism requires:"
Capitalism does not require the fulfillment of your fantasy. Capitalism is a system which upholds rights, particularly property rights, considered from an economic perspective Capitalism's only concern with voting methods, health care, wage levels, flex hours (yikes), and other issues large and small is whether or not a person's rights are upheld and (secondarily) whether something is a good economic choice.

livable wages, not just minimum wage...if In-N-Out Burger can pay $10.00 per hour to a high schooler getting his first job, what is the excuse for McDonalds, Wendys, Burger King, etc... They could but they do not want too

McD was founded in 1940 and today has a revenue of 24 Billion USDInNOut was founded in 1948 and today has a revenue of 565 Million USD.

McD exists in 119 countries.InNOut exists only in the Western United States.

If you were a shareholder and you had a choice, would you like to grow - like M

livable wages, not just minimum wage...if In-N-Out Burger can pay $10.00 per hour to a high schooler getting his first job, what is the excuse for McDonalds, Wendys, Burger King, etc... They could but they do not want too.

Profit margins for restaurants are usually around 3-4%. So, if they paid more, they'd probably just eliminate staff and automate more.

Ford understood this back in 1914, and he was far from a humanitarian:

Turnover for Ford factories was low, but few high schoolers are going to want to stay

The problem with lawyers is that the law seems to be a combination of being "correct" and/or "convincing" rather than right. This tends to lead even the more honorable lawyers down a rather crooked path as the means they have to use to deliver a just outcome are not exactly ethical if that makes any sense. The law is about technicalities when dealing with judges and charisma with juries.

I've long believed that laws should be written as a statement of intent combined with a reason for their passage, which could then be more easily interpreted by judges. If the crime doesn't match the intent of the law, or further evidence shows that the reason isn't correct we can toss out cases and/or laws and our justice system could get back to being about right and wrong again. You'd obviously need some traditional pieces to deal with penalties and the like, but can you imagine a world where congress had to spell out both the intent of a law and its reasoning. No more loopholes, no more using laws designed for one thing being abused for another(generally at the expense of the little guy).

Pretty much anyone could give a reasonable verdict if they knew what they were actually deciding on.

Yeah. Lots will argue that the army is used as a terror weapon often too. One idiot drops a really crappily made Syrian rocket into a parking lot and maybe kills a couple people. Israel drives on through with tanks blows up a few apartment buildings, arrests a crap load of people and builds a bunch more settlements. No declaration of war, no conversation with the Palestinian government etc. Reminds me of a Sepultura song:

Tanks on the streetsConfronting policeBleeding the PlebsRaging crowdBurning carsBloodsh

3 times is a start - and remember, those trolls are often shell companies with their patents transferred (like original article was discussing); if you are defendant and win, they don't have the money to fork over, so you could probably do a land-grab from their assets. (not a lawyer nor american, so no idea how stuff actually works, but one can dream)

ok, so now legally define 'frivolous' to our satisfaction - patent trolls are obviously evil, but they do own the patents and seek to justify them in court when someone else infringes them. This is quite acceptable.

Now, fixing the broad and vague software patents, that would be something useful.

Right, because corporations as people isnt a silly overreaction. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Obvious and wanton abuse of the legal system for profit should be a punishable crime, severe enough to discourage others from trying it. We put people to death for less.

Not a problem. Company owns a bunch of patents as soon as it decides to go patent trolling it creates a new $2 company and shifts the trolling patent into that. If it wins the profits transfer back to the parent company, if it loses it goes belly up and the parent company loses a now worthless patent, cue, schadenfreude laughter. Fines unpaid, debts unpaid and triple damages, ohhh, yeah, make it tens times, hundreds times, even a thousand times, makes no difference not one cent paid.

So a group of companies band together to buy patents and they create a single organisation to handle it. What else would they do? It is hardly likely that any company would be happy with the whole lot being overseen by one of the other member companies, and they would be in negotiation for years if they tried to split them all up.

So the question to the submitter is: what other outcome did you expect?

How so? The purpose of a patent is to give someone a monopoly over a specific invention, meaning to prevent other people from being able to use it or even import goods that duplicate the invention. In the event that the patent holder cannot make use of the patent themselves (eg. too costly to implement) then they can licence it or even transfer the ownership of the patent to someone else, usually for a fee.

This is exactly what has happened here. Ownership has been transferred. This is business as usual in t

According to the constitution the purpose of patents is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." I think it's safe to say that buying up useless patents and using them to harass new entries to the market does the opposite.

Fair enough, but my original question still stands. Other than the original drafters of the constitution, who actually thought that the Nortel patent purchase would result in anything other than what we have today? The complaint that you and 3seas have is with the patent system in general, not with this particular action.

The patent has still been made public, and will enter the public domain after the patent expires. So there's no contradiction with the "original intent". It may not be promoting the Progress at the rate you would like, but it's still happening.

Part of the problem is that the speed of industry has increased, so the length of a patent should really be decreasing to match. Fourteen years used to be a fairly short length of time as far as product development was concerned; now it's an eternity. But instead

But the real problem remains bad patents. If only real inventions were patented, we wouldn't see so many trolls grabbing patents on basic (and obvious) technology and preventing others from using it. Patents on math, in particular, have to go.

Respectfully, although I agree for a different reason*, those sentences are at odds with each other:

1) "bad" patents are those that are granted when they shouldn't be because the invention is obvious - i.e. not a "real" invention or a "basic (and obvious) technology".
2) but, saying "patents on math... have to go" as a conclusion would imply that you're saying that all math is basic and obvious. Didn't we see a story earlier today where it took 250 years to solve a problem hypothesized by Newton?

My sentences were not at odds. You were leaping to an incorrect assumption about my position, which is that math isn't an invention! It's a discovery of a law of nature. Therefore math patents are bad patents. That's why I explicitly mentioned "real inventions".

Obviousness is a separate issue, though of course, those patents are not real inventions either. But I wasn't limiting my argument to just one type of not-real-invention. I want to get rid of patents on everything that's not a real invention.

I think it's safe to say that buying up useless patents and using them to harass new entries to the market does the opposite.

That's begging the question... What evidence do you have that these patents are "useless"? Consider, if they successfully "harass new entries to the market" then they're clearly useful, even if you don't like it.

That's begging the question... What evidence do you have that these patents
are "useless"? Consider, if they successfully "harass new entries to the
market" then they're clearly useful, even if you don't like it.

On the contrary. If there are new entries to the market, that indicates that the patented invention isn't so difficult to develop, therefore the patent was incorrectly approved in the first place. The only effect of patenting an idea that anybody can easily come up with is to prevent innovation.

In what way? The original intent is to encourage innovation by allowing inventors to secure commercially-viable time-limited monopolies. If inventors can't sell those monopoly rights, then they're not as commercially viable.

Them setting up an organisation that managed the patents for defensive purposes only?

How quaint. Given that the patents are now being run by the folks who used to run Nortel's patent licensing program, it means that not much has really changed under the new ownership. Nortel may have claimed to want to use them defensively, but they still had a licencing program for them.

Also the new petition to the White House is not thought out at all. The big Corporations are already insulating themselves from blow back from their patent lawsuits by using Corporate shells to act as proxies, so if the proxy loses, it just goes bankrupt, and that's all.

It would be far better to do a petition for abolishing software patents once again. Re-abolishing software patents doesn't solve everything either, but that would be a far clearer goal in my opinion than trying to impose triple damages on a

Actually, a lot of us predicted this, but were drowned out by the flood of astroturf that's overwhelming Slashdot.

Just because someone disagrees with you, that does not make them an astroturfer.

This is SOP for Microsoft. They have zero interest in spending money developing new products or improving their existing lines and every interest in killing off any competition that might force them to spend that money.

Why are you picking on Microsoft? Shouldn't you also blame Apple, EMC, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony? And also Google, who also attempted to buy the patents.

How long will it be before the politicians see the problem of software patents as harming their countries own industries? Guess it will never happen, as most politicians are educated as sleazy lawyers, and they are only interested in personal gain.

How long will it be before the politicians see the problem of software patents as harming their countries own industries? Guess it will never happen, as most politicians are educated as sleazy lawyers, and they are only interested in personal gain.

They are paid very well to look the other way, I believe most if not all not only see, but understand exactly what the issues are, they are just jockeying for position to be in the group of politicians to be paid off to vote the way the patent trolls (and the 1%) want them to vote.

As important, if not more, to what they are paid to look the other way, is the amount of money that can be spent against them in any upcoming election via negative campaigning and ads, if they dare to go up against the 1%. And

that the Rockstar Consortium sues a few high profile companies and causes a lot of damage and mayhem. Then, maybe (hopefully), the uproar will be so loud that the politicians will need to heed it above the whisperings of the lobbyists and will have to admit the stupidity of the current patent system so sanity will prevail and they will fix it. However: I fear that I am just dreaming and that we will just slowly die the death of 1,000 patent lawsuits:-(

I agree with the notion, but we are trying to corral slime here. It won't be enough just to force a company to "produce something". First off, the troll will find a wiling Chinese or American "company" to "produce" "something". The company will be a token company or one with no scruples. The "something" will be a piece of shit but with enough crap in it so that it will be unclear to any judge or jury that it doesn't involve the patent. The "produce" will simply be they got some useful other idiot company to

I am not sure how someone could come to the conclusion that forcing a plaintiff to pay treble damages in the event of a loss is a good idea. Patent laws are already anti-consumer/little guy enough and there's a huge number of small-time patent holders who have been screwed out of their inventions by bigger companies. Few sue as it is and even fewer win because of the ridiculous legal fees associated. Add the risk of three-times damages, and none will. This won't hurt the big guys because often enough much m

The rotten system just got a tad more rotten. Rockstar is the king of all patent trolls, funded by the big two software IP honchos, known for their shakedown schemes and patenting the trivially obvious. The other partners are opportunists and a few badly ailing companies seeking a hail-mary pass to avoid utter extinction. It got its approval under the guise of playing by "reasonable terms", only to disobey said promise as "not applicable to the new construct" as soon as the deal went through. With a start like that, I don't have much hope left for any ethics to be involved in their way of thinking.

Rockstar has all the latest weaponry of an extremely litigious tech company, wealthy backers, plus the enormous advantage that it can't be countersued. It can start case after case without even batting an eye. The sheer amount of cases it can start can probably put a company out of business even before the first patent in play is reviewed.

If you thought Oracle vs Google was perfidious, wait until Rockstar here takes aim at Android. It's only a matter of time, and to me it seems like Android was the reason this abomination was formed. They've sealed up the LTE patents, so they'll surely squeeze them on that front, while trying keep on adding layer after layer of patent licenses, with the penultimate target of drowning it and scaring the manufacturers away.

When all commercial and academic development of everything is crushed. I can't wait for the day when not only applied technology is dead but basic research is beaten to death as well. It will be glorious

This petition to fine patent owners treble damages if the defendant wins is awful, because it screws small inventors. Invent something in your garage? Big MegaCorp steals it, and pays for lawyers you can't even dream of. They win, and you pay triple.

That link was posted multiple times to reddit but each link was downvoted so it never made the front page. For once slashdot's moderation system beat that of reddit, which seems to be susceptible to PR companies.

Uhhh...why exactly are you bothering? After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it. For all his bullshit he is just as big if not a bigger sellout that Dubya was, personally I'd say he's worse as Dubya actually believed a lot of the shit he was saying whereas this one is just cashing the checks. But if you think he is gonna give a flying shit what the "people" think I have some swampland you may be interested in. If you manage to get the requisite number all you will get is a flowery "Ur not rich so fuck off' speech, so why bother?

As for TFA...is anybody surprised? With every move Forbes gets proved right on Ballmer being a shitty CEO, hell if the man had an original thought his head would asplode. And as for the rest of the list, Sony and Ericson are doing lousy and could probably use the cash, same with RIM, and Apple just plain old hates to have ANY competition other than MSFT. See Job's comments on how he would use his fortune to nuke Android for instance.

So how anybody could look at THAT list of names and no figure out they were gonna do something nasty I'll never know.

Uhhh...why exactly are you bothering? After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it. For all his bullshit he is just as big if not a bigger sellout that Dubya was, personally I'd say he's worse as Dubya actually believed a lot of the shit he was saying whereas this one is just cashing the checks. But if you think he is gonna give a flying shit what the "people" think I have some swampland you may be interested in. If you manage to get the requisite number all you will get is a flowery "Ur not rich so fuck off' speech, so why bother?

As for TFA...is anybody surprised? With every move Forbes gets proved right on Ballmer being a shitty CEO, hell if the man had an original thought his head would asplode. And as for the rest of the list, Sony and Ericson are doing lousy and could probably use the cash, same with RIM, and Apple just plain old hates to have ANY competition other than MSFT. See Job's comments on how he would use his fortune to nuke Android for instance.

So how anybody could look at THAT list of names and no figure out they were gonna do something nasty I'll never know.

Why did Obama not legalize pot? Better question: with 74% of the nation having smoked at one point, and a majority saying pot should be legalized, why hasn't EVERY politician jumped on board with legalization? Answer: because people saying it sho

Okay, this petition is stupid and will only hurt the small guy. Say for example I work really hard on something and get a patent. Time goes on and I'm making money with the patent and all is well until a big company starts infringing on it. I could sue the company. I have the 100k it takes to even start the case. but unfortunately I my lawyers aren't as good, because I don't have the 10 lawyers they have working on it. They end up wining and it would put me out of business.

In the current setting I'd be out lawyer fees. In the new setting I'd be completely screwed even if I was seeking a reasonable amount. A reasonable amount could add up to quite a lot if the infringement is big enough. For example I'm selling my product and license out the technology for say $100 per reproduction. If they only infringed 100 times it's not that bad, but if it's mass infringement with millions of reproductions it's quite a lot, but still a fair number.

I could get behind this if there was a stipulation of "Unless you're actively using the patent in a product" or something along those lines. That would be enough to stop the trolls and not completely screw people who are using patents the way they should be.

I didn't pull the $100k number out of my ass either. I'm in the process of getting a patent on some items and I was told by more than one lawyer that's the starting fee (it varied a bit but that was the lowest figure) for litigation. I wanted to see if it was even worth pursuing, because if I can't afford to defend it what's the point in getting it? I guess I could have my name on a patent and that's pretty cool, but I don't know if it's $12k cool. I think I'm going to end up applying, because even if everything goes to heck I can always put it in my resume and it might be enough to make it standout.

Use it or loss it should be the way to go. You get granted a patent or buy it and if in say 2 years you don't have a commercially available product that uses that patient it goes into public domain. You can't sue someone unless you have an actual product that customers could have bought instead after that period. Before that period you can sue as normal since it might take a couple years to spin up production. But sitting on it and hoping someone infringes is BS.

I like this - if a patent holding company does actually produce a token product to get around this new rule, and only sell a small small number of units, then that shows what the patent is worth, too.

One of the most objectionable things with patents is that even if you do accept that you are using patented technology, the licencing fees seem to be way out of proportion to the value of the patent. If you were to actually take any typical program that you develop apart line by line and identify all the paten

Read an article a while back about drug patents. I think they actually had a proposed law not sure which country, but anyways it was to tie the reimbursement rate to the marginal value of the new drug. Ie. if your new drug is only just as good as the next best alternative of care you get no premium. If it is 20% better (hard to measure but their is quality of life measures that can be used) than you get a 20% premium or some multiple of that anyways. The beauty of this is if they ratchet up what the standar

Software needs a mechanism like that IMHO. Pricing for licensing should be in proportion to the benefit added.

I tried that once. My algorithm was O( log n log log n ^ 4/3 ) more efficient than the existing one, but their lawyers argued that that was an upper bound. On the other hand I pointed out that their cost was amortised and so arguably even my typical case would be O( log log log n ^ 2 log n ^ 1.66666689 ) more efficient. They then counterclaimed that my proof wasn't rigorous because it used infinitesimals, and then the case had to be adjourned because the judge beat himself to death with his own gavel.

All of that and make patents non transferable. if patents can still be tranfered then patent troll could start a new company every 18 months and sell all their assets to their new company. rince and repeat.

Hard to do because a lot of companies are only worth their patents. All the companies going bankrupt would have nothing to sell to recoup money for their creditors/shareholders etc. I agree a good idea but hard to implement (both yours and mine).

Just because you're sure you can win doesn't mean you will. Just because you're right doesn't mean you'll win. Just because you're getting screwed over and it's blatantly obvious to anyone with a brain doesn't mean you will win. I'm not exactly sure where you've been for the last 20 years, but things have changed a lot.

I must say I disagree with the petition too. I like the idea of trying to prevent patent trolls. Actually I'd like to prevent any case where a giant company will use the legal system to crush a small company without too much of a basis. (If Android was by small_company_inc, how do you think the Oracle vs small_company_inc would have finished? My guess it would have finished with Oracle buying small_company_inc.)

But requiring a 3 times what was asked is ridiculous. First of all, it does not cover cases where

Also, uou might sue legitimatelly and lose because of some loophole or because you were wrong.

That's the glaring issue I see with this idea. It's well-meaning, but in reality it could end up screwing the little guy even more. The fact is, most of the patent trolls have access to funds that most people can only dream of, and with those funds they are able to by star legal talent, while you're stuck with Joe Schmoe the Lawyer who got his degree online because that's all you can afford.

This will have a chilling effect like you would not believe on these types of lawsuits being brought by anyone that

Gee, burning down the CEO's homes is a waste of valuable living space. Evict them and turn the homes into housing for the poor. They'll be full of cockroaches within a month, then be torched by the residents within a decade.

"But the reality is that if there were no bailiffs to repossess property bought on credit when you didn't pay up, then no-one would loan money."

So you support that big business should not have ANY risk then? the RISK for loaning money is that you loaned money to someone that cant pay it back, hello that is a risk of business, and problem is the credit industry has the responsibility to VET who they loan to.

If there were no baillifs or if we returned to where I could file for bankruptcy and tell the bank t

so then banks did not loan any money to people 15 years ago when I could file Chapter 11 bankruptcy and cancel all debts legally and NOT have to return the car and house.

Damn, I did not know that banks and lending did not exist before 1997.

Funny thing is I have proof that it existed, as I went through it in the early 90's Kept the Car and the house, told the bank to shove it up their butt with the signature of a Judge. Their fault for lending money to a person working for a unstable company called Genera